“Some of them aren’t afraid to shoot from the hip,” says Rich Levy, executive director of Inprint, the literary nonprofit that presents the series.

And for whatever reason, Levy adds, many of the featured books are anchored by a strong sense of place:

Junot Diaz straddles New York and the Dominican Republic in his new collection of short stories.

Jesmyn Ward paints a portrait of Gulf Coast poverty in her award-winning “Salvage the Bones.”

Zadie Smith dissects Northwest London in her just released novel, “NW.”

Perhaps it’s fitting that Houston — the most diverse metro area in the country — welcome so many far-reaching voices, Levy notes.

Eleven writers are slated to appear between September and August; all will sit for candid, on-stage interviews following each reading. The interviews, conducted by members of Houston’s literary community, are an opportunity to hear from the person behind the words.

This is a bold group, Levy says, so the season should be lively.

Emma Donoghue, Nov. 12, 2012.

Junot Díaz, who won a Pulitzer for his debut novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” launches the series Sept. 24. This is his second appearance; he was a guest of Inprint in 2000. His new collection, “This is How You Lose Her,” explores love gone wrong — more specifically, Levy says, the immaturity of young men in their dealings with women. It’s loud and quiet, comic and dark… reflecting the hot mess that love often is.

T.C. Boyle, who has 13 novels and nine short story collections to his credit, will read Oct. 15 from his new historical novel, “San Miguel,” which takes its name from an island off the California coast. With female characters planted at the center of the action, the novel looks at life in an isolated place over two generations: one in the 1880s and the other in the 1930s.

Apparently, Boyle has a soft spot for Texas. Earlier this year, the author sold his archive — some 43 boxes of drafts, letters, rejection slips, reviews and more — to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Astray,” Emma Donoghue’s new collection of stories, also shifts across time, offering a series of vignettes about immigration. A prolific Irish author perhaps best known for her recent novel, “Room” — which is written from the perspective of a 5-year-old — Donoghue will be interviewed Nov. 12 on-stage by local author Robert Cremins, who teaches at the University of Houston’s Honors College. Cremins and Donoghue are acquaintances; they attended neighboring high schools in Mount Merrion, Ireland, a Dublin suburb.

Zadie Smith, Jan. 28, 2013.

“I remember being very impressed with her first novel, “Stir-fry,” when I read it in the mid-90s,” Cremins said in an email. “A precocious talent!”

Hari Kunzru will appear on the same evening as Donoghue, reading from his recent “Gods Without Men.” Like so many other works this season, Kunzru’s novel skips across time, but the main story follows a couple whose autistic child disappears in the desert. The action takes root around a rock formation in Southern California known as the Pinnacles.

Zadie Smith, who drew international acclaim with her debut book, “White Teeth,” will read Jan. 28 from “NW,” her new novel about contemporary life in the racial and cultural melting pot of Northwest London. One of Smith’s strengths, Levy and Jones agree, is her ability to write beyond race. Her books are really about how people fit together in different communities.

Poets Kim Addonizio and Terrance Hayes, whom Levy describes as “pretty feisty,” appear Feb. 25. Unlike many of the poets in the series, Addonizio is not associated with a university. “She’s a discursive poet,” Levy says. “You can hear her personality in her work. She’s gritty.”

Terrance Hayes, Feb. 25, 2013.

Hayes, a 2010 National Book Award-winner for “Lighthead,” is known for his expansive, lyrical sensibility; his poems pull from rap music, classic literature and everything in between. As Levy observes: “He’s attentive to the music of the poem.”

Coming-of-age stories take center stage on March 25. Local writer Amber Dermont, who earned her Ph.D. in creative writing at UH, will read from “The Starboard Sea,” her first novel. The action takes place at a boarding school of last resort in New England. Because the plot evolves around a suicide, critics have compared the novel to John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace.”

On the same evening, Jesmyn Ward will read from “Salvage the Bones,” winner of the 2011 National Book Award. Ward’s book about a Southern community coming together to face Hurricane Katrina offers a kind of antidote to Dermont’s novel of Northern privilege.

“This is about a girl living in abject poverty in a coastal town in Mississippi,” Jones says. “Her lifeline is literature.”

Inprint’s reading series closes April 22 with a night of nonfiction, with readings by Jonathan Lethem and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Jonathan Lethem, April 22, 2013.

Lethem will read from “The Ecstasy of Influence,” a miscellany of essays in response to Harold Bloom’s famous book of critical theory, “The Anxiety of Influence,” which outlines the struggle of present-day poets to create original, nonderivative works. Sullivan, a darling of the literary nonfiction world, will read from “Pulphead,” his first book-length collection of essays, taken from 10 years of writing on a smattering of different topics.